I have shot a lot of footage with a P3P and when I upgraded to a new 5K IMac the quality of the footage is terrible now when viewed at full resolution.

Has any one ideas why this has happend as when I edited it on my Mac Book air it looked ok. But now at full 4K it really looks bad...

Just as a thought... Could it be that Final Cut Pro as not rendered it yet?

Will try that now and see if that helps..

Yes it does... I had to render the clip first... Wow looks amazing!

Click to expand...

I'll give you the exact reason.

At 4K you are ahooting at 3840x2160

When you view that on a MacBook Air, at 13" with the latest ones even your highest resolution is 1440x900.

So think about that, you are watching a massive sized video at 3840x2160 in a box that's 1440x900, it's the reverse of zooming in until you see pixels. The smaller the viewer, the better the image.

I'll use extremes to explain this.

5120x2180 is our 5k iMacs (I have the same beautiful one) and now you are actually (if you watch it at full screen increasing the size past the UHD and stretching the pixels and degrading the image. If you just play it at its normal size, it should look great to you. It might still not look as good as watching it on the small 1440x990 box but now you understand why I hope.

By the way, footage at 5K on that screen looks amazing and it's available on YouTube.

Extreme example. If you watch a 640x480 (toy copter size on your MacBook Pro, it would like pretty crappt), if you watched it full screen on a 5k monitor, it would look like a bunch of pixels.

There are 14,700,000 pixels on that 5k it takes more then even UHD to fill them up but it gives you lots of screen space.

Now watch 5k stuff (they have some on YouTube) to be really blown away by your iMac.

Do you understand why you took a visual step down playing that at full screen now?

Edit: well you edited quite a bit from your original post but yeah, you were essentially looking at proxies but realize is you watch 4K at full resolution on that 5k, it should still look good but you are stretching pixels. It's literally like zooming in on it.

For the record, the reason 2.7k exists is so you can push in and get 1080p to get rid of blades and gear but they don't have a camera that can shoot 5k yet.